UPDATE: Several folks in the comments, especially Portia and Radfem, read more closely than I did and noticed that there’s a disturbing pattern here; regardless of whether or not she really did want him to hit her to cause a miscarraige, the boyfriend is an abuser.
From the Houston Press:
“Later that morning, Davis and Lieutenant Mike Shapaka picked up Jerry at Lufkin High School for questioning. In the interview room, Jerry admitted to hitting Erica the night before, but only on the arms. He’d been out with friends, he said, and she tore into him about coming home so late. So he hit her a few times, just to get her to leave him alone.
Davis and Shapaka asked if he’d ever hit Erica before.
Yes, he said, but he always aimed for the arms.
As Thomas wrote:
If he was only attacking the fetuses there would be, at most, a strray bruise here or there. He’s a liar. His admitted abuse, and his likely pattern of abuse, also brings into question whether she really wanted to terminate the pregnancy, or was coerced into that by her boyfriend. (From my view on abortion, it follows that she had an absolute right to carry the pregnancy to term, and she’s entitled to be vindicated for the deprivation of that right as well.)
Like I said, if _all_ he did was help attack fetuses in her body with her consent, I have no problem with it. But that’s not what happened here. If he coerced her to terminate a pregnancy, threatened her or abused her (and he admits that he did), then he belongs in jail (for abusing her, not the fetuses, to which I concede no rights). The articles you supplied, Radfem, makes it clear to me that the latter is what happened, which totally alters my view of what ought to happen to this guy. He wasn’t trying to help her terminate an unwanted pregnancy. He was abusing her, and maybe forcing her to terminate a pregnancy that, whether planned or not, she had not freely chosen to terminate.
Clearly I posted too soon. My apologies to everyone for screwing this one up, and thank you Radfem and Portia for spotting my error.
Original post follows.
As far as I can tell – and it’s hard to know for certain – the story here is that a 16-year-old pregnant girl, Erica Basoria, and her boyfriend, Gerardo Flores, jointly agreed to abort her sixteen-week pregnancy by beating her around the stomach. None of the news stories I’ve read explains why they didn’t go to a doctor. Maybe they were just too stupid and scared and afraid of being found out; or maybe pro-lifers have succeeded in removing all practical access to abortion where these kids live.
Under Texas’ fetal protection law, a mother can never be charged for “murdering” her own fetus – but someone else can (there’s an exemption for health care providers). She was pregnant with twins, so the boyfriend has been found guilty of a double homicide and, unless the case is successfully appealed, will spend the rest of his life in prison.
This appalling injustice is what happens when pro-lifers control the law; and the prosecutor made it clear that if he could, he’d have sent the mother up for life, too.
From the Lufkin Daily News:
Nineteen-year-old Gerardo Flores of Lufkin was sentenced to life in prison Monday in a landmark test case of a state fetal protection law. An Angelina County jury deliberated just under four hours, finding him guilty on two counts of capital murder for his part in killing his unborn twins.
The case will be appealed, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court, defense attorney Ryan Deaton said after the verdict. […]
Flores’ girlfriend, Erica Basoria, 17, was led sobbing from the Angelina County Courthouse by her mother and older sister. While her family testified against Flores, Basoria stood by his side, maintaining she was involved in causing the at-home miscarriage.
Flores’ mother, Norma Flores, stood in stunned silence, surrounded by family members for several minutes after her son was led away by Sheriff Kent Henson.
Under state law, a woman cannot be charged for causing the deaths of her own fetuses for any reason. A similar federal law went into effect in April 2004, a month before Flores was charged.
Bauereiss told jurors he was focused on Flores. He couldn’t help that Basoria was outside the reach of the law, he said. If the babies had been killed after being born, it wouldn’t have been so controversial, he said.
“Think what a horrible crime this would be,”? he said. “We wouldn’t hesitate to label it for what it is.”?
Another twist: It seems possible, and maybe even likely, that the fetuses were dead before Flores ever began participating in the amateur abortion attempt. From an earlier article:
Flores was first indicted for allegedly causing the babies’ deaths after assaulting Basoria the night of May 6, 2004. He admitted to beating her hours before the miscarriage, and to stepping on her pregnant belly several times the week before. His indictment was later amended after news of Basoria’s alleged involvement in the deaths.
Dr. Tommy J. Brown, forensic pathologist for the Jefferson County morgue, performed autopsies on the twins.
The babies had likely been dead in Basoria’s womb for days before the May 7 assault, Brown said Thursday. The cause of death was ruled a homicide by blunt force trauma, according to his autopsy report.
As a photo of the miscarried fetuses circulated among jurors, most of the seven-woman, five-man panel couldn’t seem to bring themselves to do more than glance at it, quickly passing it on.
Brown admitted under questioning by defense attorney Ryan Deaton that he wasn’t able to determine whether Basoria or Flores caused the deaths.
I really wish they had been willing or able to go to a doctor and have an abortion done. But abortion – whether it’s done by a competant medical professional, or by two stupid and scared teens – is not the same thing as murder, and life in prison for this is disgusting.
The defense attorney tried to blame the whole thing on the girl, of course. Didn’t fly with the jury.
Note that the mother’s wishes are – as always, with pro-lifers – entirely irrelevant. Really, I’m amazed that they didn’t go for the death penalty.
Civil Commotion and U235 have posted on this; I haven’t seen any other blogs mention this yet.
Robert, everything you’ve just written is true, but I think this earlier comment must’ve been a mistake.
If a test has a 1% false positive rate, and you take the test and it comes out positive, then there’s a 99% chance that you have the disease.
Except we’re not talking about statistics, we’re talking about how to abuse them. We’re not talking about toenail fungus—we’re talking about women and, oh, this nasty stereotype of them as liars.
Nah, it’s a skill thing. WordPress is open source and free, not a commerical package. The people who have the level of skill needed to code something themselves, can also “pop the hood” and know why something goes wrong when WordPress has a problem; the problem is, I lack that level of skill.
I lack that level of skill
You have no skillz. You are not 3l33t.
It’s just “l33tz0r,” Robert, you poser!
“The facts as they appeared when Amp first posted raised more interesting issues … what do you do with a kid who is trying to help his girlfriend do what most of us think she has a right to do, but endangers her or harms her in the process?”
See, I completely disagree with any kind of “pro-choice” position that can so handily overlook the woman in question. This zeroing in on the boyfriend and the fetus(es), that’s anti-woman. There IS NO ‘kid who is trying to help his girlfriend’ when she is endangered or harmed in the process. There’s no mythical magical fairyland where there’s nothing going on except that a girl is carrying an unwanted pregnancy and her boyfriend with the superbestest of intentions only wants to help her and oops, she gets hurt in the process.
That kind of “pro-choice” mentality is in it for the fight, is looking for that case full of “interesting” facts to finally trump, and win, over the “pro-life” crowd. It’s not about women. It’s as though an awful lot of “pro-choice” people were just dazzled by the superlatives of the situation, and are hoping for another, and are still not (as ginmar brilliantly says) cottoning on to the supremity of the damage being done to women.
There is no ‘interesting case’ where the punishment of someone who ends a pregnancy will be worse than the harm done to that woman, not in my view.
And not even hikers sawing themselves free from boulders is analogous to blunt trauma to an organ that causes that organ to cease functioning.
I agree, in fact, I think everyone here does agree. I do, however, think it’s important to remember that the pro-choice need to address this isn’t about this being a ‘viable form of abortion’, but instead that this is the type of ignorant and harmful choices that people might end up making (hurting themselves, whether it be with ‘assistance’ or by yourself) as some sort of make-shift abortion because all other choice is either gone or near impossible to access. Especially among younger adults; expecting people to have your more educated perspective from the get go, sans any genuine access to sexual education and reproductive services is (most unfortunately) very much a ‘mythical’ magical fairyland as well.
The implication that people are rallying around this as a legitimate form of choice is a misrepresention of what is being said; moreover, people are saying that it could be a very unfortunate by-product of lack of access to reproductive services.
people are saying that it could be a very unfortunate by-product of lack of access to reproductive services
I’m having a hard time finding the words to express what I’m thinking, but it really still strikes me as wrong to look at harm to women as a by-product of anything else. Like “normal” DV as a “byproduct” of poverty. Or rape as a “byproduct” of war.
For me, “choice” is about nothing BUT harm to women, and preventing it. But I think, to read these comments, that to a lot of people, it’s first, if not ONLY, about “choice”. And I think that’s where it fails as an ideology. The political is not sufficiently personal if that’s your (general) focus, and that’s how we end up going down rabbit holes of decrying sentences like this as “too harsh for just a couple of stupid teenagers.” That’s how the woman gets disappeared.
Well, then, you shouldn’t look at the very real harm this precedent will do to women as an unfortunate by-product of an extremely dubious means of protecting this one woman. And if you are troubled by the idea of violence against women as an incidental concern, you should be more worried about the incidental way in which this woman was protected from violence. She was disappeared in this case, remember? The fetuses were the victims.
I am not talking about preserving choice, that is, the choice to consent to letting your boyfriend stomp on your stomach. I am talking about the redefinition of words like assault, battery, trauma, and violence that will eventually recriminalize abortion as an instance of all of the above. I am talking about the false dichotomy between medical/surgical/professional abortions and the amateur kind that women will increasingly turn to as the former become increasingly difficult to obtain.
Believe me, I am all for prosecuting people who injure women, as well as prosecuting abortion providers who malpractice upon women. But this is different–this law has nothing to do with harming women or stopping harm to women as harm to women. It’s about what this man did to poor, defenseless, little fetuses. We can’t let that distinction escape, because blurring the line supports two crucial, terrible tenets of anti-abortion crusaders:
1) Harming a fetus is at least as bad as harming a woman.
2) Harming a fetus is doing violence to a woman.
One correction to the tenets:
1) Harming killing a fetus is at least as bad as harming a woman.
Well, the strikeout tag didn’t work there. Sorry.
It should read “killing a fetus is at least as bad…”
I think we want the same things, piny, but I also think that because we approach them from different directions, cases like these will make us appear to be at odds. That’s the issue that I’m trying (badly) to explore. Maybe we’re not at odds at all; maybe it’s good to have differing avenues to enumerate the many, many things that are wrong about this situation and this law.
Yeah, it looks as though that’s true.
I feel like an idiot about not seeing the DV implications in this fr0m the beginning, too. And, for what it’s worth, I wasn’t ever terribly horrified about the boyfriend’s plight. (Not to sound cold-blooded or anything….) It was much more, “Oh, my God, this is such a horrible idea,” than, “Oh, my God, that poor young man!” And when I emphasized their youth, it was to rebut the idea that they–or, more specifically for purposes of my comments, she–should have been able to navigate the courts in search of a legal abortion.
This just seems so, so, so dangerous.
And Robert, I don’t think I agree. This kind of reasoning does support criminalizing other harm done to fetuses–which, incidentally, is already criminal in many states. It’s difficult to diagnose and attribute problems more subtle than miscarriage immediately following severe trauma, but there’s no argument in this argument for punishing it less severely than harm to an adult or to the woman herself.
First;
Portia, you took the concept of it being a by-product of lack of access and shifted it into violence by others being a by-product. I think it was fairly obvious I was speaking quite clearly about non-medical abortive methods and not DV, but if not, I’m making that clarification now. The by-product that I’m talking about is in cases where the woman does HARM TO HERSELF or engages others in the task of doing harm to her with the goal of self-aborting. To imply that women would never do this to themselves, or that they would never attempt to get others to help them in doing so to themselves is in my mind willfully ignoring a by-product of lack of access to reproductive services.
Second;
I actually do disagree with the judgement. I think he should have been charged with something appropriate and tried on that – ie: assault (or whatever charges Texas has that addresses the brutalization of one person towards another). I’m not a particularly ‘punitive’ person in the long haul, and don’t agree that giving this young man 2 life sentences is even partially acceptible in this situation.
Anyone who usually aims for the arms when hitting on his girlfriend pregnant or not does not get much sympathy from me. I am sure if the young man bucked up got a job and stopped beating on his girlfriend she’d probably would have chosen to keep the twins….The sad but true thing is most batters never quit they just get worse and worse….Then you have two innocent babies right smack in the middle of it all….So perhaps a life sentence will save a few more victims from his abuse in the future when he would have broken his current victim down so far she is unable to get back up on her own…. And he moved on to his next unexpecting prey.
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I was one of the girl’s best friends, and I know all she went through. Not only stupidity has a role in this act but also the support she did NOT get from her family. Her mom was a mad woman!!! She kept on telling her that she was too young, to abort the babies, even though she knew it was too late for an abortion, and that she was stupid for becoming pregnant. That it was a way God was punishing her.
If I would have been in her shoes, I would have felt bad about the pregnancy as well. So I really don’t blame her, she is an amazing friend, I just feel she was confused. Her boyfriend’s family supported her and were there for her, but how Jerry was with her… it brought her mind into doubt. All she needed was support from everyone in her family. All her friends where happy with her pregnacy and touched her belly, but for a successful pregnancy to start and end… it needs support from both the father and it’s surrounding family members.